National Awards Urban river cleanup, Realtors help homeless, Students reopen school Local partners Portraits of caring: Aiding a wounded soldier's family 10 years of volunteering in Conn., UAW/GM lend a hand, Bread for the needy Upgrading from a shanty In this article: Homeless showers Rebuilding a home Uninsured dental care Also: Local projects honored

Make A Difference Day AwardsPortraits of caring

Boys & Girls Club showers the homeless with towels
Broken Arrow, Okla.

Clockwise from far left: Jake Law, Morgan Bizzell, Janis Fraley, Meagan Bizzell and Jaden Crawford helped provide much-needed towels for a homeless shelter.

Each day, 500 people come to Tulsa's Day Center for the Homeless, lining up eagerly to use its 15 showers. But there was a problem: The masses had access to only 100 clean towels, so some didn't get a turn.

When swimmers and staffers at the Salvation Army Boys & Girls Club read in the Tulsa World about the towel shortage, they dove into action. (After all, who better to empathize over a lack of towels than a bunch of swimmers?)

The result: a snappy collection of 300 towels.

On Make A Difference Day, 45 volunteers ages 6 to 60-something targeted motorists in suburban Broken Arrow for help by dramatically draping towels across a makeshift clothesline and waving towels at traffic. They even held their director and assistant director "hostage" at the top of a 20-foot donated cherry picker and "ransomed" them only by collecting towels from passersby.

"What everybody walked away with was how easy it is to make a difference in somebody's life," says Shelley Persinger, 44, the club's aquatics director who led the drive. "What's so insignificant to us is huge to someone who doesn't have something."

Think about that the next time you're in the shower.

$10,000 Make A Difference Day Award from Paul Newman benefits Salvation Army Boys & Girls Club of Broken Arrow, Okla.

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Habitat home rises -- this time from the ashes
Albany, Ga.

In 2004, calamity struck. The home of Donald Kelly, 47, a single father of two young children, burned down, and the family was displaced to a one-bedroom apartment. The fire destroyed more than a structure: It ravaged Kelly's effort to provide stability and a decent home life for his children.

You see, that house had been a dream that was realized on Make A Difference Day 2001, when Kelly and Habitat for Humanity built it.

"As soon as the fire happened, we wanted to fix it," says Stacey Odom-Driggers, Habitat executive director in the Flint River affiliate region. "Donald is a hard worker, and this is a good family."

And that's why, on two different Make A Difference Days, one family got two new homes.

On Oct. 22, volunteers began arriving at 6:30 a.m. to put up the frame for the house. As they started, many neighbors emerged from their homes to pitch in. "Normally that doesn't happen," Odom-Driggers says, "but since the Kellys were already part of the neighborhood, everyone wanted to help."

On moving day, volunteers presented Kelly's kids with a memento from the old house -- a wooden nameplate salvaged from the ashes, freshly repainted and ready for hanging. For Kelly, it was the homecoming he'd longed for. "Habitat helped me and helps other folks who have nothing."

$10,000 Make A Difference Day Award from Paul Newman benefits Flint River Habitat for Humanity, Albany, Ga.

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A close brush for 302 uninsured people
Burlington, N.C.

Dentist Steven Slott, left, and dental student Kim Hammersmith helped patients, including Bryan Tinnin.

Jeri Loy, 49, didn't have money or insurance -- just pain. But when she arrived at the Open Door Dental Clinic of Alamance County on Make A Difference Day, no one asked how she would pay for an extraction and three fillings. Dental volunteers just went to work. "I needed the tooth pulled," Loy says. "There wasn't hardly [anything] there. Just pain."

Emergency dental care is available to needy adults two nights per week at Open Door. But for Make A Difference Day, organizers expanded, offering basic, preventive and emergency dental care at a two-day, 30-chair marathon session in a MASH-style setup at a Burlington, N.C., church hall. "Needy folks really have nowhere to go," says Steven Slott, 53, the dentist who established the two-day clinic in his town and sees it as an annual Make A Difference Day event.

Slott and 174 other volunteers saw 302 patients, doing $80,000 worth of work total. Many of the needy began lining up each day well before the volunteers arrived at 7:30 a.m. "So many people are in pain, and they've been living with it for months," Slott says. "This is satisfying because once we see them, they're better."

Kim Hammersmith, 24, a second-year student at the University of North Carolina's School of Dentistry, oversaw several gnarly procedures. "Some patients just had teeth rotted to the gumline," she says. "Others have had toothaches for a year -- and we just fixed them."

$10,000 Make A Difference Day Award from Paul Newman benefits Open Door Dental Clinic of Alamance County, N.C.

Photos by Danny Turner (Broken Arrow, Okla.) and Charles Ledford (Burlington, N.C.) for USA WEEKEND